hernandez derrida political possibilities

8/17/2019 Hernandez Derrida Political Possibilities

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MabiniReview

POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

Institute of Social History


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Published byPolytechnic University of the Philippines

Ofce of the Vice President for Research, Extension,Planning and Development

INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL HISTORY

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PHILIPPINE COPYRIGHT, 2012 by

Polytechnic University of the Philippines

The Mabini Review, No. 1, Vol. 1

First Year of Publications, 2008

ISSN: 2012-2144

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means,

except brief quotations for a review, without permission in writing

from the Publisher.

Illustrator

Jayson C. Jimenez

Printed by

Ofce of the Vice President for Research, Extension,Planning and Development


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T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

P R E F A C E

M A J O R A R T I C L E S

i

3

71

115

47

95

AXIOMS OF CHOICE

Virgilio A. Rivas

ON “EVIL, SIN AND THE FALL”:

FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE OF THE

CHRISTIAN PROBLEMATIZATION

OF THE FLESH

Kristoffer Bolaños

DERRIDA’S IMPOSSIBLE JUSTICE

AND THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITIES

OF DECONSTRUCTION

Michael Roland F. Hernandez

JOHN SEARLE AND THE

IS-OUGHT PROBLEM

Jeremiah Joven Joaquin

TOWARDS A RADICAL

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN

VISAGE: FROM NBIC CONVERGENCETO SINGULARITY TALK

Marciana Agnes G. Ponsaran


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B O O K R E V I E W S

129

137

135

WHAT CAN PHILOSOPHY DO IN THE

PRESENT?

A Reading of Badiou and Zizek’s

Philosophy in the Present

Jayson C. Jimenez

THE BELOVED IDIOM

A Reading of Villafania’s Pinabli

& Other Poems

Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo

PRUDENTE AS REVOLUTIONIST

AND PROPHET

Alfredo O. Cuenca, Jr.


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143

152

L I T E R A R Y

162

145

156

PREFACE TO THE LITERARY

SECTION

Alfredo Cuenca, Jr.

MJ RAFAL

Ulat sa Tula

Ars Poetica ng Makata sa Karsel ng Sarili

Kung Ita-tag Mo Sila Makikilala Kang

Makata at Sisikat sa Tula

ELAINE LAZARO

Bread and Fish

The Height Of…

Kulam

I Wonder How Real Writers Write

DENNIS ANDREW S. AGUINALDO

Days of Going Nowhere

ForeparentsPortrait, After 31 Years

The Grandfather Lullaby

C O N T R I B U T O R S


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B E C O M I N G

by Jeric Palada


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Derrida’s ImpossibleJustice and the

Political Possibilities ofDeconstruction*

MICHAEL ROLAND F. HERNANDEZDepartment of PhilosophyAteneo de Naga University

Thinking between Metaphysics and Politics

To think the relation between Metaphysics and Politics is to encounter

the age-old problem that links the essence of the philosophical

with the political. It is to think, following the tradition of Plato and

Aristotle, the nature of the polis (or city-state) from the perspective of the

truth as expounded by philosophy and as ideally ruled by philosophers.

Within the ancient Greek schema, such reflection on the nature of thepolitical is itself grounded on the metaphysical notion of the Platonic

Good as it should be manifested in the polis. In Plato’s Republic ̧ the good

of the polis can only be determined in terms of the demand for the good

of each individual citizen. But these particular goods in themselves are

participations in that ideal universal Good which serves as the source of

everything.This gesture implies, for Plato, that ethics (which is about the

self and its relation to the other) is essentially structured for politics and

these two together, in turn, require Plato’s metaphysical concept of the

Good in order to determine their own proper objects, namely, the goodof the self in relation to the other and the common good. That politics

depends on metaphysics is ultimately, however, just another expression

of the truth that inseparably links the nature of philosophy with the

political. Philosophy has always been political through and through and

it is this relation that we want to understand in this paper.

*A paper presented to the Philosophy Department of the Polytechnic

University of the Philippines (PUP) in Manila on January 28, 2011.


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M a j o r A r t i c l e s

| M A B I N I R E V I E W 72

Every discourse necessarily has its own political agenda. Even

in a small philosophical conference like this, the attempt to understandpolitical issues from the perspective of philosophical episteme and not

only from ordinary political opinion [doxa] is the metaphysico-political

gesture par excellence.“Every philosophical colloquium necessarily has a

political signification”1 and this is not only due to what has linked the

essence of the philosophical with the essence of the political but because

political implications give philosophical truths more weight, makes

them appear more serious, and somehow endows them with a profound

character or identity. Philosophically, then, to speak of political themes

is a very difficult task for this entails that one be a real philosopherand an expert on political affairs. I must caution you then that I am

neither both. Although this constitutes an effective disclaimer, I wish to

emphasize though that the task of thinking about politics is incumbent

not only upon us philosophers but on all of us citizen-dwellers in the

state. It is from this responsibility that I get the audacity to speak before

you today.

As a student of both philosophy and of law, I cannot but be

incessantly concerned with what concretely happens in the social andpolitical spheres. The many social and political pathologies of our

time demand an ever-increasing commitment to the demands of both

philosophic reflection and concrete involvement. This means that we

must not only be content in contemplating the eternal truths of being but

must also translate these truths into concrete social and political action.

With these in mind, I wish to propose to you this afternoon Jacques

Derrida’s deconstruction as an alternative way by which we can look at

our present social and political experiences.

Having been dubbed as the likely heir to the masters of

suspicion—Marx, Nietzsche and Freud—Derrida arguably stands as

one of the most enigmatic and controversial philosopher of our present

time. His deconstruction, incorrectly understood by “conservative

know-nothings”2 as primarily a method or a strategy for reading

1Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy ̧ trans. Alan Bass (Chicago,

University of Chicago Press, 1982), iii.2This description is provided by Richard Rorty in his polemic both against


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M . R . H e r n a n d e z | Derrida’s Impossible Justice

| An Interdisciplinary Journal 73

texts, has almost always been viewed with suspicion by traditional

philosophers who see in him nothing but a despiser of common senseand the traditional democratic values of truth, reason, and objective

knowledge. Such reduction of deconstruction into “some sort of entirely

formalistic method based on an unproven philosophy of language” is

what characterized the appropriation of deconstruction by generations

of scholars in the humanities.3 For this reason, this charge of semiotic

reductionism tended to confine deconstruction into the realm of the

philosophy of language that ultimately has nothing to do with the

concrete conditions of human life. More specifically, this means that

deconstruction as the “sort of thing Derrida does” has little or nopractical value in the realm of politics. Might this not therefore confirm

Richard Rorty’s initial impression about Derrida being good as a “private

ironist” but insignificant as a “public liberal?”4

It is at this point that I wish to address the temptation to

consider Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive project as a relapse back into

political quietism and despairing resignation from the horrors of politics.

Following Simon Critchley’s suggestion, I will also advance the idea that

it is possible to conceive of deconstruction as important in articulatingthe source of a concrete moral obligation and political disposition to help

alleviate the other’s suffering.5 But in order to do this, it is necessary to

Derrida’s critics and fans in the Anglo-American tradition that confines

Derrida and what he does to that sort of “deconstruction” that seeks binaries

in texts, overturns the hierarchical relation and pronounces that there is

contradiction within the text which serves as its central message. Rorty claimsthat this thinking produced tens of thou-sands of readings which are formulaic

and boring. (See Richard Rorty, “Some Remarks on Deconstruction and

Pragmatism” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe [London:

Routledge, 1996], 13-18; 15).

3Simon Critchley, “A Dedication to Jacques Derrida-Memoirs” in German

Law Journal Vol. 6. No. 1 (2005): 26.

4Rorty, “Some Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in

Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 17.

5Simon Critchley, “Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal” in

Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 19-40; 33.


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clarify what deconstruction is all about, the end or goal at which Derrida

aims, and the political possibilities arising from these considerations.

In what follows then, I will first provide Jacques Derrida’s brief

biographical sketch that insinuates his perennial political concerns.

Second, I will provide a description of deconstruction as something

that takes place within the text following Critchley’s suggestion of

deconstruction as a kind of “double reading.” And third, I will relate

this movement to the problem of justice and to its resulting political

possibilities.

Derrida’s Political Concerns

Jacques Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, in French-occupied

Algeria to Jewish parents. Being Jewish, Derrida realized at a very

young age the problems connected with specific identities and racial

discrimination. As a young kid, he was forced out of school on several

instances because only a 7% limit on the school population was allocated

for Jewish students and on another occasion, he had to withdraw from

school because of anti-semitic practices. Moving from Algiers to Franceas a teenager, he was twice refused entrance into the prestigious Ecole

Normale Superieure , the school of France’s elite.

Eventually however, he was admitted into the Ecole at the

age of 19 and began working with the leftist journal Tel Quel , a group

that espoused radical reforms from the government in favor of the

marginalized. Although his early training was in phenomenology,

Derrida acknowledges Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Heidegger and

Levinas, as among those who largely influenced his thought. He credits

the above mentioned thinkers in the development of his over-all approach

to reading texts—what was to be later called “deconstruction.”

It was in 1967 however when Derrida acquired his status as a

philosopher of worldwide importance. He simultaneously published

three books: Of Grammatology , Writing and Difference , and Speech and

Phenomena, where he discusses what would be later termed as standard

deconstructive vocabularies such as logocentrism, phonocentrism,


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metaphysics of presence, trace, supplement, and the infamous

“différance .”

In these works, he sought to question the traditional privileging

of the authority of presence and Being [Sein or esse ] and the values of

truth, rationality and knowledge. Such gestures put him as one of the

leading figures, together with Michel Foucault, of what was labeled as

‘French post-structuralism.’ As a prolific writer, Derrida wrote many

important works which would range from topics of metaphysics and

epistemology to question of aesthetics, culture, and politics. It was

however in his discussion of Marx and his later works on friendship,6 democracy,7 law,8 political decision,9 apartheid,10 sovereignty, nationalism

6See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London

and New York: Verso, 1997), 1-74.

7Ibid., Chapter Four: “The Phantom Friend Returning (In the Name of

Democracy),” 75-106. Also Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction

and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 77-88.

8See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of

Authority” in 11 Cardozo Law Review [1990], 920, 967. The above is a 1989

lecture during a conference on deconstruction and justice convened by the

philosopher and legal theorist Drucilla Cornell that was subsequently published

in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice , [edited by Drucilla Cornell, et al.

(New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-67; also published in Jacques Derrida, Acts of

Religion, edited with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York, Routledge,

2002), 228-298]. In this lecture, Cornell asked Derrida to address the questionof “deconstruction and the possibility of justice” where he had to address a

text by Walter Benjamin on violence.

9Derrida, Politics of Friendship, Chapter Five, “On Absolute Hostility:

The Cause of Philosophy and the Specter of the Political,” 112-133; see also

Derrida’s dialogue with Giovanna Borradori in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 130ff. Henceforth PTT.

10See Jacques Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word” in Psyche: Inventions of theOther , Volume I, trans. Peggy Kamuf, 377-86; and “The Laws of Reflection:

Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” trans. Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz,

Volume II, 63-86.


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and cosmopolitanism,11 hospitality,12 the university and the teaching of

philosophy,13

terrorism14

and many other socio-political philosophemes,that strategically demonstrates the potent force that deconstruction

acquires when it links “the essence of the philosophical to the essence

of the political.”15

Here, it would be a mistake to trace or reduce Derrida’s political

concerns to his biographical life. But it is obvious that his early experiences

of discrimination in life were to play a large part in his promotion of

the cause of the marginalized “other” in his later thought. If there is

one positive thing that Derrida is telling us about deconstruction, itwould be the claim that deconstruction is about the other, an opening

to “an alterity which necessarily calls, summons, and motivates it.”16

Deconstruction has always been about the other whom we must address

as a matter of justice. Contrary then to the claim that deconstruction

is an “enclosure in nothingness,” Derrida offers deconstruction as a

way out of this enclosure within linguistic subjectivism and theoretical

solidification.

11See for instance Borradori, 130-134; also Jacques Derrida, Schurken

[Rogues], (2003). Not yet translated into English at the time this article was

written.

12See for instance Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 125-130; also

Jacques Derrida, On Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to

Respond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

13See for instance Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The

University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” trans. Catherine Porter and Edward

Morris, Diacritics ̧13 (1983): 3-20.

14See Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror , 113ff.

15Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 111.

16Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other” in Dialogue with

Contemporary Continental Thinkers , ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1984), 118.


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Deconstruction as Double-Reading

At this point, we can use Critchley’s characterization of

deconstruction in terms of double-reading as a heuristic device in

presenting deconstruction as something that happens within texts.

Accordingly, deconstruction is “something that takes place in a text”

as in a text that loses its own “construction” so as to open itself to a

multiplicity of meanings.17 For Critchley, what is first involved in this

process is to provide a “patient, rigorous, and scholarly reconstruction

of a text” as a powerful, primary layer of reading that remains faithful

to original context of the text and intention of the author in the form ofthe dominant commentary.18 From this first layer of reading, a second

moment of reading is opened up by interpretation where the text’s

intended meaning [its vouloir-dire ] is purportedly contradicted by certain

“blind spots” in the text.19 This opens up the text into a multiplicity

of meanings other than that sanctioned by authorial intent. But this

“rupture” is something that is sanctioned from within the text itself rather

than imposed from the outside. It is this opening up from within the

text itself which characterizes deconstructive reading as parasitic: “the

reader must both draw their sustenance from the host text and lay theircritical eggs within its flesh.”20 Deconstruction then can be conceived as

a subject-less process in the sense that “the text deconstructs itself rather

than being deconstructed.”21 Within Derrida’s intention, a deconstructive

reading therefore is an ambiguous gesture since while it must necessarily

carve itself out of a structuralist problematic , it nevertheless remains, more

importantly, as an antistructuralist gesture.

Considering deconstruction as double-reading, one can see

that what Derrida philosophically exemplifies is a patient, meticulous,

scrupulous, open and questioning engagement with texts. This means

17Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend” in Derrida and Differance

(Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1-5; 2.

18Critchley, “A Dedication to Jacques Derrida-Memoirs,” 26.

19Ibid., 26-7.

20Ibid., 27.21Ibid.


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that the activity called deconstruction is not some form of nihilistic

textual free play that threatens to undermine our traditional values ofrationality, morality and other values of Western liberal democracy.

Rather, it is a careful reading and thinking of texts considered as an

ethical demand.22 Deconstruction in fact, as Critchley insightfully claims,

is pedagogy23 inasmuch as it teaches us to deal with texts responsibly as

a matter of justice.

In this context, we can see that deconstruction, as something

that takes place within the text, is itself the ethical gesture that lets the

text be structurally open to the other. Here, the other must be understoodas that which has always been appropriated and therefore neglected

by the whole philosophical tradition. By opening a text to its other,

deconstruction opens up the space for the possibility of justice, that is,

the possibility of addressing that which tradition has always thought to

be “impossible” as the not-possible, beyond possible—beyond thought,

language and presence. Here, I am taking broad strokes in delineating

how Derrida’s deconstructive project can be related to the exercise of

justice and hence, to political decision. Inasmuch as it opens up the

space for the possibility of addressing the other, then, deconstruction isitself justice.

Deconstruction is Justice

What does it mean to say that “deconstruction is justice?”

Derrida explains this assertion in the context of the tension between law

(droit ) and justice. In his essay “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation

of Authority,” a lecture delivered during a conference organized by the

philosopher and legal theorist Drucilla Cornell in 1989, Derrida sets out

to distinguish between law and justice. Accordingly, law refers to the

history of right, of legal systems, and justice. As such, the law could be

deconstructed.24 There is a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of

22Ibid., 28.

23Ibid., 27.

24Jacques Derrida, “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with

Jacques Derrida” in John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York:

Fordham University Press, 1997), 16.


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positive laws, and this history is the history of the transmutation of laws.

The law can be improved and replaced by another one. Every time youreplace the law by another one, a system by another one, or you improve

it, that is a kind of deconstruction and critique. As such, the law can be

deconstructed and has to be deconstructed.25 This is the condition of

historicity, revolution, morals, ethics and progress. But Derrida says that

“justice is not the law;” and he goes to explain:

Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive or the

movement to improve the law, that is, to deconstruct the

law. Without the call for justice we would not have anyinterest in deconstructing the law. That is why I said

that the condition for the possibility of deconstruction

is a call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law,

to a given system of legal structures. That means that

justice is always unequal to itself. It is non-coincident

with itself.26

The unfolding of justice as the motivating force or impulse

for the deconstruction of presence clarifies the question of “what isdeconstruction all about?” If we are to make any theoretical or practical

sense of “what is there to” or “the point about deconstruction,” it would

to be this sense of justice that serves as its goal or end. Deconstruction

is all about justice and Derrida expresses this claim within the context

of the law:

Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside

or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more

than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists.

Deconstruction is justice.27

In order to understand this better, Derrida makes a distinction

between justice as the relation to the other and the idea of justice as law

or as right. Justice as law or right is justice as it is dispensed by the legal

25 Ibid.

26Ibid., 16ff.27Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14-15.


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system. It is limited to what the law, understood as the history of rights

and legal systems, defines and calculates in terms of an economy ofreciprocal duties and obligations. What can be calculated within the law

is the existence of rights that grounds certain privileges such as the right

to property, education, etc., and the determination of “justice as right”

that results from the correct application of particular legal principles to

specific situations. What is right can be calculated, as when we say that

this deed deserves one month, two years, three decades, or four centuries

of imprisonment based on a certain set of laws. In this way, one can

determine within the law whether one is just, i.e., in terms of what is

right or not when his actions conform to the norm or not. As such, rightis reduced to a matter of calculation. However, the fact that a decision is

rightly calculated does not mean that it is just. Derrida explains:

Law is an element of calculation, and it is just that

there be law, but justice is incalculable; and aporetic

experiences are the experiences, as impro-bable as they

are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in

which the decision between just and unjust is never

insured by a rule.28

Justice is not a matter of theoretical determination and goes

beyond the certainty of theoretical judgment or knowledge. To illustrate

this, Derrida gives the example of a judge, who, in order to be just, must

not be contented in the mere application of the law.

To be just, the decision of the judge, (...) must not

only follow a rule of law or a general law but must also

assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting

act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously

existed of the law, as if the judge himself invented the

law in every case. No exercise of justice as law can be

just unless there is a “fresh judgment.”29

28Ibid., 14.29Ibid., 23.


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The judge therefore

[Has] to reinvent the law each time. If he wants

to be responsible, to make a decision, he has not

simply to apply the law, as a coded program to a given

case, but to reinvent in a singular situation a new just

relationship; that means that justice cannot be reduced

to a calculation of sanctions, punish-ments or rewards.

That may be right or in agreement with the law but that

is not justice.30

Justice, then, ultimately is not the law and “law (droit ) is not

justice.”31 For this reason, as long as one remains on the level of legal

application, one cannot be “sure” that he is just. One can never say that

someone is just or a decision is just in the present as long as he does not

leave the current system of the law in order to treat each case as an

“other.” Since justice has to do with the absolutely other, every case

requires a decision based on “an absolutely unique interpretation, which

no existing rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely.” Thus, one can

only say that he is “legal or legitimate” i.e., “in conformity with a stateof law, with the rules and conventions that authorize calculation but

whose founding origin only defers the problem of justice,”32 but he can

never claim to be “just.”

In short, for a decision to be just and responsible, it must, in its

proper moment if there is one, be both regulated and without regulation:

it must conserve the law and also destroy or suspend it enough to reinvent

it in each case, rejustify it, at least reinvent it in the reaffirmation and the

new and free confirmation of its principle.33

In this case, the kind of justice found in the present order or

system of the law is always a limited justice that ought to be supplemented

30Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable,” 24.

31Derrida, “Force of Law,” 15.

32Ibid., 23.33Ibid.


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by the idea of justice as relation to the other. This justice as relation to

the other operates from the outside of the law in order to open its insidetowards that which it is unable to say or capture within the system. The

law is a closed system, “finite, relative and historically grounded,” and it

is only opened up by an infinite and absolute justice that “transcends the

sphere of social negotiation and political deliberation.”34 As such, this

[j]ustice if it has to do with the other, with the infinite distance of the

other, is always unequal to the other, is always incalculable. You cannot

calculate justice.35

Justice as Gift

That justice is incalculable brings us to the conclusion that

justice is not a matter of reciprocation. Justice demands that it not be

reciprocated and for this reason must be seen outside the economy of

exchange. Justice is therefore like the gift: both go beyond calculation

and resist appropriation. For Derrida, the gift is something that can

never be appropriated.36 It never appears as such and is never equal

to gratitude, to commerce, to compensation, or to reward. The gift is

beyond the circle of gratitude and reappropriation and for this reason;no gratitude can be proportionate to a gift. One cannot even be thankful

for a gift. As soon as one says “thank you” for a gift, the gift is erased,

is cancelled, is destroyed. “A gift should not even be acknowledged as

such.”37 If something is given, it should not appear as such to the one

who gives it or to the one who receives it. This is paradoxical, but that is

the condition for the gift to be given. In Given Time , he explains:

For there to be a gift, it is necessary [ilfaut ] that the

donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself,

enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted

34Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 164.

35Ibid., 24.

36Derrida’s most comprehensive account of the gift is contained in his

book Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1992).37Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable,” 18.


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a debt. (...) The donee owes it to himself even not to give

back, he ought not to owe [il a le devoir de ne pas devoir]and the donor ought not count on restitution...38

The gift calls upon us for expenditure without reserve, for a

giving that wants no payback, for distribution with no expectation of

retribution, reciprocity or reappropriation. “To give a gift requires that

one then forgets and requires the other to forget, absolutely, that a gift

has been given, so that the gift, if there is one, would vanish without a

trace.”39

It is thus necessary, at the limit, that he not recognize

the gift as gift. If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift

appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as

present , this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift.

Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say, of

the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent. (...) The symbolic

opens and constitutes the order of circulation in which

the gift gets annulled.40

This is the same condition in which justice must share. A justice

that appears as such, that could be calculated, a calculation of what is

just and not just, that says what must be given in order to be just, is not

justice at all. Rather, justice must partake of the idea of a gift without

exchange, of a relation to the other that is utterly irreducible to the moral

rules of circulation, gratitude, recognition as symmetry.41 As beyond

calculation, it partakes of the structure of that which is to come, going

beyond the comprehension by ordinary theoretical knowledge and the

38Derrida, Given Time , 13.

39Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 144.

40Derrida, Given Time , 13.

41Derrida explains that economic calculation has to do with priority of

absolute subjectivity. Thus to speak of a justice as gift is to go beyond the

authority of subjectivity, beyond any egoism, and also of any reciprocity,

much like in the manner of Christ’s sacrifice. (See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of

Death, trans. David Wills [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 102.


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language of presence. A justice that does not become a gift, in the end,

becomes mere social security and economics.

To speak, then, of justice as the relation to the other is to

emphasize that element of incalculability which is not found in the

experience of justice as law or justice as right. This “incalculable justice”

is what we refer to as the “point” to deconstruction. It is that on account

of which we embark on the endless and difficult task of examining,

clarifying, and criticizing texts in order to open it up and articulate what

has always been repressed, displaced, or margi-nalized by the tradition.

This enunciation of the plight of what is continuously marginalizedwithin the structures of present history, politics, economics, law, and so

forth, follows Levinas’ definition of justice as the relation to the other.42

This relation to the other, Derrida claims, is all that there is to justice and

he explains this thus:

Once you relate to the other as other, then

something incalculable comes on the scene, something

which cannot be reduced to the law or history of

legal structures. This is what gives decon-struction itsmovement, i.e., to constantly suspect, to criticize the

given determinations of culture, of institutions, of legal

systems, not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel

them, but to be just with justice, to respect this relation

to the other as justice.43

An (Im)possible Justice to Come

Justice calls us to respond to the call of the other, which, as

radical alterity, is that which exceeds the totality of presence. But to

respond to the other as other, in terms of the language of the other,

is to open up to the experience of justice as an impossibility. Justice

moves us to respond towards something which is not present, is not in

the present, and can never be fully realized in the present. The call of

42See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority ,

trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 89.43Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable,” 18.


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justice moves us to respond towards an other that is never present but

can only be hoped for in a future to come. Justice is impossible becauseit is to come; it is a hope and a waiting directed to an otherto come in

the future. This impossibility is what makes deconstruction as a passion

for the impossible, a desire which we desire beyond side, what we love

like mad.

And deconstruction is mad about this kind of

justice. Mad about this desire for justice. This kind

of justice which isn’t law, is the very moment of de-

construction at work in law and the history of law, inpolitical history and history itself...44

“Justice is an experience of the impossible,”45 Derrida

claims, and it requires the experience of the aporia as a “non-road,”

as “something that does not allow passage,” outside the scope of any

calculation. Without this experience of the aporia, “[a] will, a desire, a

demand for justice (...) would have no chance to be what it is, namely,

a call for justice.”46 Justice as an impossible experience of the aporia is

situated outside the element of calculation within the legal system. Itis this justice beyond calculation, and even one that resists calculation,

which gives the law its impetus to be always on the way for a greater

appropriation of justice. Justice comes to the law as its impossible

condition, i.e., a condition which the law cannot capture and can never

justify before itself. Thus, justice is something that cannot be determined

by the performance of obligations or duties that one is bound to do under

the law. Justice is the condition without which there would be no law, or

the possibility of the law. Here, we can say that the essence of justice is

to have no essence, to be in disequilibrium, to be disproportionate with

itself, never to be adequate to itself, never identical with itself. Having no

essence, justice therefore never exists and the fact that it does not exist is

essential to justice. Since it has no essence and does not exist, justice can

never be calculated and demands that it not be calculated. And since it

cannot be calculated, justice is therefore undecon-structible.


45Ibid., 16.46Ibid.


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Justice is not deconstructible and this goes hand in hand with

the deconstructibility of the law. In this “interval that separates theundeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of the law,”47

deconstruction takes place to punctuate the law in order to safeguard

the possibility of justice. This point is what answers the question about

the connection between deconstruction and the possibility of justice:

deconstruction is what opens up the possibility for justice and this

possibility is that which prevents the law from being legalistic, from being

a closed system concerned only with legitimation and with rectitude.

Such undeconstructibility clarifies an important point about the nature of

justice: justice is not a thing, among others, that we subject to unendingdeconstruction. While it is true that there is no end to deconstruction

and everything is deconstructible, justice

(...) if such a ‘thing’ ‘exists,’ is not a thing . Justice

is not a present entity or order, not an existing reality

or regime; nor it is even an ideal eidos toward which

we earthlings down below heave and sigh while

contemplating its heavenly form. Justice is the abso-

lutely unforeseeable prospect (a paralyzing paradox) invirtue of which the things that are deconstructed are

deconstructed.48

The fact that justice exceeds law and calculation however does

not mean that we could not or should not calculate. Left to itself, this

incalculability of justice might be reappropriated for the worst cases of

calculation within institution, states, and others. Instead, Derrida insists,

“incalculable justice requires us to calculate” not only within the law but

also in those other fields that cannot be separated from it.49 In fact, we

“have to calculate as rigorously as possible.” However, “there is a point

or limit beyond which calculation must fail, and we must recognize

that.”50 He continues:


48Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell , 133.

49Derrida, “Force of Law,” 28.50Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable,” 19.


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Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation

between the calculable and the incalculable, andnegotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn’t have

to be reinvented there where we are cast, there where

we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible,

beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the

already identifiable zones of morality or politics or

law, beyond the distinction between national and

international, public and private, and so on.51

By setting the calculability of the law and its institutions againstthe incalculability of justice, an important point is clarified in this relation

between law and justice. Incalculable justice is beyond the law but it

strategically remains as law and politics’ inexhaustible demand. Justice

is always à venir , to come, and its structural possibility as an imminent

future is what continually moves both law and politics always toward

a fuller precipitation of justice. Law and politics must therefore always

look upon justice as that which is to come, à venir . This is because the

legitimacy of the legal order cannot be offered except in retrospect, i.e.,

force and violence are what is present at the founding moment of the lawand justice only comes afterwards as its justification.52

Thus, we see that Derrida’s passion for impossible justice is what

makes deconstruction as a movement towards, as a kind of waiting for, an

(im)possible future.53 Deconstruction itself is “a movement towards the

future,”54 which can only operate on the basis of this idea of impossible

justice, i.e., an “infinite ‘idea of justice’.” Derrida explains:

[T]he deconstruction of all presumption of a

determinant certitude of a present justice itself operates


52Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror , 164.

53See John Caputo, “Introduction” in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,

1997), xvi-xxvi; 1-6.54Ibid., 131.


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on the basis of an infinite “idea of justice,” infinite

because it is irreducible, irreducible because owed tothe other, before any contract, because it has come, the

other’s coming as a singularity that is always other.55

This impossible justice, identified here with the infinite “idea

of justice,” is what characterizes deconstruction as a deeply affirmative

enterprise. It is therefore a vocation, a response to a call and for this

reason, can never be merely negative. Deconstruction is therefore an

enterprise whose affirmative character is beyond being positive, beyond

the distinction between positive and negative. And it owes its affirmativecharacter to this undeconstructible, infinite “idea of justice” that is owed

to the other and hence

[Irreducible] in its affirmative character, in its

demand of gift without exchange, without circulation,

without recognition or gratitude, without economic

circularity, without calculation and without rules,

without reason and without rationality.56

Such impossible and infinite justice is, Derrida continues, what

we can recognize, indeed accuse, or identify as “madness,” and “perhaps

another sort of mystique.”57 Mad and unpresentable though it may be,

however, this justice which impassions us to deconstruct towards the

future doesn’t wait. “It [justice] is that which must not wait.”58 Justice is

therefore imminent and this imminence is what agitates the coherence of

the present in order to show its structural inconsistency. For this reason,

justice plays a part in a future which must be distinguished from a future

that can only “always reproduce the present.”59 In fact, it is this futural

dimension that is inseparable from the very idea of a deconstructive

justice.


56Ibid.

57Ibid.

58Ibid., 26.59Ibid., 27.


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Justice remains, is yet, to come à venir , it has an, it

is à-venir , the very dimension of events irreducibly tocome. It will always have it, this à-venir , and always has.

Perhaps it is for this reason that justice, insofar as it is

not only a juridical or political concept, opens up for

l’avenir the transformation, the recasting or refounding

of law and politics. (...) There is an avenir for justice and

there is no justice except to the degree that some event

is possible which, as event, exceeds calculation, rules,

prog-rams, anticipations and so forth...60

This “to come” of justice is the structural orientation that moves

it along towards the future, making it unpresentable, uncalculable,

undeconstructible, and impossible. As such, the future is what disturbs

the present beyond itself so as to open itself to the call of justice. Here,

to say that justice is present is to do the most unjust thing since this

amounts to a closing off of the future, and consequently, to the ultimate

impossibility of justice.61

The Gift of Messianic Justice

In this vein, we can see that the irreducible structural futurity

of justice is what ultimately constitutes the enigma of finite human

responsibility. If justice is to come and deconstruction is a waiting for

an impossible future, does this not condemn us to a useless, passive, and

non-committal quietism that merely awaits the fatalistic coming of the

inevitable ‘unthinkable, unnameable, undeconstructible, unpresentable,

impossible?’ On the contrary! The deconstructive waiting for the

coming of impossible justice is precisely what opens us to the experience

of singular responsibility. This impossible justice is what calls us and

provides that interruption of the present so that we can move with

responsibility towards the future. Because of this responsibility, it is

possible to move towards the experience of justice, which as à venir ,

is what keeps us ready to receive that which is to come. For Derrida,

deconstruction as a kind of waiting for the impossible is precisely possible

60Ibid.61Caputo, Prayers and Tears , 81.


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because of this openness to receive the coming of the other in a future

justice to come. This openness paves the way for a responsible answerto an “unforeseeable future” which, as called forth by justice, partakes

of that “universal structure” in our present experience that readies the

human person for the reception of that which is to come.

As soon as you address the other, as soon as you

are open to the future, as soon as you have a temporal

experience of waiting for the future, of waiting for

someone to come: that is the opening of experience.

Someone is to come, is now to come. Justice and peacewill have to do something with this coming of the

other, with the promise. Each time I open my mouth,

I am promising something. When I speak to you, I am

telling you that I promise to tell you something, to tell

you the truth. Even if I lie, the condition of my lie is

that I promise to tell you the truth. So the promise is

not just one speech act among others; every speech act

is fundamentally a promise. This universal structure of

the promise of the expectation for the future, for thecoming, for the fact that this expectation of the coming

has to do with justice…62

This universal structure is what Derrida calls as the “messianic

structure” since it is that which is in our present experience that readies us

for the reception of that salvation that comes from a justice to come,

an other to come, and ultimately, a Messiah or a God who is to come.

The “messianic” has to do with the “absolute structure of the promise,

of an absolutely indeterminate, (…) a structural future, a future always

to-come, à venir .”

The messianic future is an absolute future, the

very structure of the to-come that cannot in principle

come about, the very open-endedness of the present

that makes it impossible for the present to draw itself

into a circle, to close in and gather around itself. The

62Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell , 22-3.


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messianic is the structure of the to come that exposes

the contingency and deconstructibility of the present,exposing the alterability of (…) the “powers that be,”

the powers that are present, the prestigious power of

the present.63

The messianic is a structure of experience which prevents our

present experience from being self-contained in its present. The messianic

is what allows us to encounter the other, as “something that we could

not anticipate, expect, fore-have, or fore-see, something that knocks our

socks off, that brings us up short and takes our breath away.”64 By virtueof the messianic structure, it is possible for us to address “god” and the

“other” with the word: “Come” [Viens ]. It is what enables us to always

pray, plead, and desire the coming of the Messiah.

E p i l o g u e : In Lieu of a Conclusion

To speak of the political possibilities of deconstruction is tospeak in general terms of how deconstruction, as such, can become

relevant for our actions in the political sphere. As what I have tried to

show, deconstruction as an openness to the other is a positive response

to the ethical demand occasioned by the “that-which-is-to-come.” That

which is to come is the other to whom we must respond in justice and

infinite responsibility. To address the other requires the experience of

justice which is not limited to what the law dictates or provides but to that

experience of justice as relation to the other—beyond law, conventions,

and institutions. This notion of justice beyond the law, beyond the rules

of reciprocity is what Derrida aptly characterizes as impossible. Such

impossibility is what ultimately characterizes deconstruction as an

impossible enterprise but nevertheless gives it an internal dynamism as a

movement towards the future. This movement towards the future is what

makes the deconstruction of the political sphere a search for that non-

violent and non-appropriative relation that finds its model in Derrida’s

63Ibid., 162.64Ibid.


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understanding of friendship. Such ethical relation can be construed as

the basis for a political decision that aims at an ever-fuller experience of justice. To speak then of the political possibilities of deconstruction is

to recognize that deconstruction, like philosophy, is essentially political

through and through. And this deconstruction of our being political is

one of the responsible ways to exercise our wonder in being human and

the fact of our being-with-others.


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| M A B I N I R E V I E W94

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hernandez derrida political possibilities

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